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CHRIS CUTLER
Workshop
– “Compositional
Techniques in Progressive Rock Bands”
(*)
With Henry Cow, as
with the Soft Machine, the method differed with the composer - and all
of us came from quite different backgrounds - that was one of the more
interesting things about the group: that such different people had somehow
to get along and find a musical language they could all agree about.
We employed several different compositional methods, and these, and
the kinds of compositions we played, changed quite radically over the
life of the group.
We had four primary composers: Fred Frith, Tim Hodgkinson,
Lindsay Cooper and John Greaves. Fred had studied violin but then took
up the guitar, after which he – like me – joined a series of groups
playing Shadows and Beatles covers - then R and B, then acoustic guitar
in folk clubs. Tim Hodgkinson was pretty immersed in jazz, especially
the free jazz of the early Sixties: Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane,
and so on. John Greaves had worked in his father’s dance band in Wales,
playing standards mostly, and show music. Lindsay Cooper had been in
the National Youth Orchestra, and had studied at the Royal College and
the Julliard. She was the only member of the group who was fully formally
trained.
Compositions came to us in the form of written scores, which might be
in various states of completion, depending on whose score it was. When
I joined, Fred produced fairly skeletal scores as I recall, with riffs,
repeated sections, some closely written parts and space for solos. He
used a lot of the vocabulary of rock, and at the same time was the composer
most influenced by the New York school, especially John Cage and Morton
Feldman. The quite catchy tune at the beginning of the first track of
our first record was, for instance, composed using chance processes.
Fred always composed with some scheme in his mind that was not necessarily
audible in the piece. On the second album his main piece, Ruins,
draws, for instance, on the Fibonacci series, and the whole
composition has a mirror form. It begins with a drone which emerges
into a composed melody section - all Fibonacci-based - and then arrives
at an organ solo over a repeating measure of fifty-five beats, accented
by two alternating chords with varying distances between them. The middle
section which is scored for viola and bassoon with unison interruptions
of xylophone, bass and snare
drum, uses a rhythm relation of five against four, unusual in rock;
then the whole composition flips around in the middle and the structure
goes into reverse – back through the 55/8 riff, this time with the guitar
soloing, and finishing with another melody and a drone. I say this in
order to indicate that the way Fred composed was guided by a great deal
of pre-planning and of the refinement of the ideas he was working on
in any given piece, which were in general either, like Ruins,
based on numbers or on chance processes - however much these compositions
were articulated and elaborated through a rock perspective, most of
the time.
Tim would present completely through-composed scores. Every part, except
for the drums, was completely written out, and from the beginning there
were no solos or riffs in any of Tim’s pieces. In fact there were seldom
two bars next to each other in the same meter, and much of the time
different parts of the band were playing in different meters. Tim composed
in a highly complex, contrapuntal and non-repetitive melodic way, spreading
his lines over long stretches of time. They were the most technically
demanding pieces the group had to play, and they were difficult to learn: Henry Cow had a rule never to take a score to the stage, so all
the music had to be internalised. Tim’s first piece was fifteen minutes
of highly involved, overlapping, through-scored music - with no repeats.
But we just had to learn it.
Another Henry Cow rule was that the composer no longer owned the composition
once the band had started to work on it. So, in the course of rehearsing,
if someone said “I don’t like this section, we should change it, or
take it out”, or “let’s put this here instead of there”, the composer
could not say, “no, it has to be as written”.
As the group evolved, pieces with repeats and solos pretty much disappeared
from the composing repertoire, so that when in concerts we played pieces
with solos and repeats, they were old pieces. Like Soft Machine, from
whom we probably stole the idea, a concert would be a kind of macro-structure
in which we would sequence different pieces together in a certain order,
and then decide how we could bridge them together so that we didn’t
have to stop playing. A concert tended to be one or two long blocks,
sometimes an hour each. Sometimes one of us would be commissioned to
write a bridging piece; otherwise we’d sit around in the rehearsal room
and work the bridges out together. To keep life interesting we would
frequently change the material around and generate new macro structures.
Fred’s material was the most flexible and amenable to changes in treatment,
and his pieces tended to open up our live performances, since they lent
themselves to variation and rearrangement.
In sum, individuals would come in with more or less completed scores,
and then the group would work on them collectively. The shape of a whole
programme and bridging sections we worked empirically between us.
There were three exceptions, which I’d like quickly to mention.
The first was when we had to make our second record for Virgin. Lindsay
had only recently joined us and we didn’t have enough material written
for the new instrumentation – on top of this, she had just had two wisdom
teeth removed, which limited our rehearsal possibilities rather. When
we’d made the first record, we followed the typical pattern and documented
the material we were already playing live and were pretty familiar with.
Essentially, we just set up and played. But as we worked, we came to
understand that a recording studio is in fact an amazingly flexible
compositional tool - and we decided to use that tool to compose the
material for the second side of our new LP. It’ s been said many times
– and with justice - that recording essentially makes any
sound you can hear available for organization. What is said
less frequently is that the recording studio is an instrument that makes
performances available
as raw material for further organisation, offering performers, in particular,
the possibility of composing with
performances. We worked in several ways: by improvising,
listening, mixing, selecting and editing; by considering an edited piece
as the base upon which to build with written or improvised additional
material; by manipulating the studio itself, blending musique
concrete techniques with customised composition and performance.
The result was a series of highly structured, but unperformable, pieces.
One, for instance was built around a fifty-second loop, which wound
all the way around the studio. The friction of the bottles and microphone
over which it travelled slowed it down sufficiently to drop the pitch
about three semitones, making the sound immediately more interesting.
We played this back, adding parts piecemeal to give it further shape,
then copied, from another multi-track, a harmonised melody from one
of the written pieces we had already recorded, then returning this,
at half speed, to the tape we were working on. To this melody we added
extra written parts - recorded at double speed, so that they would play
back an octave down in pitch. For overall structure, we executed a long
cross-fade, over the space of about six minutes, first establishing
the loop, then introducing the rather spooky melody which finally faded
out alone.
As a compositional method these procedures worked primarily through improvising
listening,, some customised scoring, and manipulating tape. We eschewed
discussion: if somebody said, “I think this would sound interesting”,
we would put it to tape first, then see how it sounded.
Second: in 1976 we were engaged to play a tour in Holland, meanwhile
John Greaves left the band, so we had either to cancel or figure out
some alternative programme; we couldn’t play any of the existing repertoire
without the bassoon and saxophone, which were structurally indispensable.
Tim was in the middle of composing a new piece at the time, and had
finished about two and a half minutes of it (it clocked in at 20 minutes
when eventually completed). We decided to work with this, and withdrew
to a house in Yorkshire for a week where we expanded the two and a half
minutes into fifty. The process was wholly collective: we disassembled
Tim’s fragment, repeating and developing sections or phrases of it,
adding solo sections, and interpolating two long textured plateaus.
It wound up as a coherent, rather formally structured piece which, since
it was all generated from a very small amount of original material,
was very thematically consistent. It fell into five sections. One, three
and five were all derived from Tim’s score, and were introduced by one
of us playing a short solo, based on the same material. Sections two
and four each consisted of eight or nine minutes of undifferentiated
texture - the first and only time we used drone
material. The first was built from an electric guitar played
with a prism, some large glass bowls, a bass guitar prepared with clothes
pegs, and an electric organ. The second - well, imagine somebody dropping
an huge tray of scrap metal onto the floor, extended for eight minutes
with no centre or macro-structure: like an aural Jackson Pollock.
The third exception occurred on the occasion of another tour hit by ill
and missing band members, this time in Scandinavia. We decided to do
a continuous two-hour programme, played in complete darkness, of pure
improvisation. Only three points were fixed: a drum at the beginning
and a little wooden flute. About a third of the way through there was
a “wedding”, gathered around a cascade of tubular bells, and at the
end an unsquare march-like melody that Fred had written for the occasion.
We all had in mind the idea of some sort of evolution, some development
over the course of the piece. And – using an idea we probably stole
from Stockhausen - we all prepared pre-recorded tapes, each two hours
long. Lindsay’s, I think, spanned childhood to old age – beginning with
infants and ending with the very elderly. Tim had extracts from the
earliest music he could find to the most contemporary, and Fred used
existing Henry Cow material - from the beginning of the group to the
point we’d reached. This material would only be heard occasionally -
whenever each musician chose to bring it into the mix, with a foot-pedal
– but it exercised a significant influence on the dramaturgy that informed
the entire performance.
As well as formal compositions, most of which - Tim’s and Lindsay’s
in particular, and later Fred’s too - were very strict, each concert
would consist of at least 40% freely improvised music. This was non-generic,
non-idiomatic improvisation and we allowed ourselves – as most improvisers
at the time didn’t - to mix genres. Jazz, for instance, has strong genre
rules, even free jazz. There were things one was simply not allowed
to do. And the so-called European school of improvisation, though stylistically
quite different from free jazz was, like Darmstadt serialism, a form
that shunned melody, harmony, recognizable rhythm and definitely any
kind of beat. Our vocabulary was far more open. As a kind of collective
composition, improvising was important to us as a musical and communicative
activity, and we thought of it in compositional rather than [self-expressive]
terms. In addition, the highly complex nature of our composed pieces
forced us to learn all manner of techniques that we didn’t by nature
already have and, once these were in our lexicon, they inevitably found
their way into improvisations. In contrary motion, things that emerged
out of improvisations tended to be stored away to reappear later in
compositions. Each discipline fed and extended the other. And neither
was more important to us.
Finally, I would say that what Henry Cow had in common certainly with
the Soft Machine was that our extra-rock influences were strictly contemporary:
Janacék, Bartok, Schonberg, Stockhausen, Berio, Messaien, and so on.
New York school was less apparent but in the air. At the same time we
took from what was current in improvisation - in American Free Jazz,
the European improvisation scene, and through bands such as Sun Ra.
MEV and AMM. Electronic music, Tape Music and Musique Concrete were
all active influences, and we electrified and processed our instruments
(not just guitar, bass and organ, but also bassoon, saxophones and percussion).
Taken together, I think these strategies were somewhat different from
those of many of the groups that have been discussed in this conference
so far who tended, if I may say so, to rather be less of their own time
and allied more to the classical music of the late 19th Century.
---- From the questions...
What is generally called progressive rock today, is identified not
by the influence exerted by 20th Century contemporary music and visual
art, but by the music of bands who integrated elements of late 19th
century music into their musical language. This marks an essential difference
between two musical tendencies that co-existed for a few years between
the late 1960s and early ‘70s until the second group - those who brought
in late 19th Century classical tropes - were labelled “progressive”.
Though, in a sense, by reverting to the musical language of an earlier
century, they were more regressive than progressive.
We had all grown up listening to pop music on the radio and buying
records and music had become important to us, not least because our
parents – indeed, grown ups in general – disliked it, leaving the field
free. A lot of us didn’t have any formal musical training, but did want
to be in bands; and many learned to play sitting around in rooms alone,
or in groups, trying to copy what we heard on records. Our instruments
were outcasts: electric guitars, drum kits, electronic organs – not
taught in the academy - and the music we were addicted to was culturally
marginal, mostly sneered at or ignored; there was no school, no rulebook
and nobody to tell us how to do things properly. Skiffle was the gateway
– a very basic music that demanded little facility and no expensive
equipment (guitar, packing case, broom-handle bass and washboard). From
this foundation there was general move to electric guitars, bass and
drums - The Shadows, for instance, were a skiffle group before they
became the Rolls-Royce of British
instrumental groups and, as Franco [Fabbri] said in his talk, from a
musical point of view such instrumental groups functioned as a perfect
music education system - all the rudiments were there: melody, harmonised
bass, chords and rhythm divided into the four instruments. Moreover,
the electric guitar allowed you to design a new sound – a new instrument
- for every tune by changing the settings on the guitar or the amplifier,
or stopping the strings with your palm, or using a tremolo arm, or an
echo chamber, or just by playing near to, or far from, the bridge. The
range of possibilities immense, far greater than that offered by any
acoustic instrument. If you heard a new sound on a record, you wanted
to know how it was made, if you saw a band with an inventive player,
or a new approach to playing or writing, you’d tell everybody to go
and see them, and to pass the innovation on. And you’d probably try
to copy it too. In time we became competent enough to begin stealing
from more diverse and unusual sources than guitar instrumentals and
blues players. And because there was no external community to contain
us, other than the community represented by a few friends and the gramophone
records we listened to (and we were voraciously listening to everything
we could get hold of), we weren’t inhibited by authority, teachers or
tradition and, inevitably, fragments of other musics began to enter
our vocabulary. There was a natural progression that moved from copying,
and trying to sound like the bands one liked, to attempting to bring
in new elements from outside the pop and rock vocabulary. Without going
too far into reasons, I the mid ‘60s there came a point at which innovation
itself acquired a positive value. And ours was generation serious about
innovation and experimentation. Indeed it was the currency of our peers.
Finding something that nobody had heard before would make you a significant
member of the community - and that field was completely open; innovation
was not so hard once you got rolling. Think of Frank Zappa, who pulled
every kind of style and every kind of music into his own, making no
hierarchy or distinction between them. His example encouraged and licensed
a similar freedom in others. And in Britain, certainly, in a fairly
short time – in a cluster, around mid 1967 - a huge diversity of groups
seemed to appear out of nowhere: Soft Machine, the first Pink Floyd,
Arthur Brown, the Incredible String Band, Sam Gopal, The Third Ear Band,
Fairport Convention – all working in very different musical territories,
but all doing something very new. We ourselves part of the general tide
of innovation in all the arts at that time. It was only when more trained
musicians began to introduce 19th Century classical elements, with escalating
quantities of equipment and increasingly elaborate stage-shows, that
the present began to slip away, and the past reasserted itself. But
it was increasingly those groups who were facing backwards that were
called progressive. The distinction between these two tendencies seems
to have been lost in discussions now, but I think it clarifies a lot
that seems confused in much academic debate.
In late 1966 there was
a real feeling of optimism. A generation of young people began making
their own music, organising their own concerts, innovating rather than
waiting for guidance from managers and record company executives but,
within ten years - by 1976 – we had slipped into a mirroring period
of pessimism and cynicism, from which we haven’t yet escaped. Once the
brief explosion of punk was contained, the record industry was firmly
back in control, and the hopeful experiments of the ‘60s disappeared
into the background.
